Topic: [XMR] Monero - A secure, private, untraceable cryptocurrency - page 1506. (Read 4670972 times)

+1. An excellent response and exactly the right sort of tone.

Definately worth reading DGA´s reply, kudos for that dga.

Meh, so now Vitalik feels threatened by Monero? I think we're winning guys!

dga:

This would be a very reasonable thing to assert if I had anything to do with Monero.  I don't.  In fact, to the best of my knowledge, none of the people who profited from early optimized Monero mining had anything to do with crippling the code in the first place.

Think of it this way:  You step in and inherit a legacy codebase for a promising and interesting new cryptocurrency.  You're immediately beset with demands -- fix bugs, release binaries, answer help questions, etc.  In retrospect, it turns out that the code you took over had been de-optimized by its original creators.  Is that your fault?  Of course not.  What's the standard that we should hold the Monero developers to?  To fix any bugs or deliberate weaknesses as fast as they can after they become aware of it.  To get up to speed and review and understand the codebase they inherited as quickly as a reasonable developer can do.

You're picking your words very carefully, so I suspect you know exactly what game you're playing trying to hint that Monero is a scam while being able to defensively say "well, I only said perhaps", but it's very transparent.  And, personally, I find it mildly offensive that you're twisting what I wrote in the article and ignoring some of the substantive points.

-moronic trolling-

Reading comprehension is hard for sockpuppets.  Something in the sock material seems to cloud their eyes.

To others reading the thread, while I'd of course encourage you to actually read what I wrote.

tl;dr:  Bytecoin was a scam, they crippled the miner, Monero inherited it when Monero was still "bitmonero", and it took a while before the Monero devs got the code fast by undoing the crap that Bytecoin had added.  During that time, I made some money.  After that time, I didn't.  That time has been over for a long time.

To their credit, the Monero devs have always been up-front that there's a lot of work to be done with respect to auditing, both in cryptography and design, and in implementation, and they've made credible progress at doing so.  One hopes that any baggage from the cryptonote/bytecoin fork has been priced in and is well understood by the community, given that the coin's been around for months and the developers have been very up front about these things and their plans for addressing those risks.

Remember though, this was the same exact line of attack that was being used against BBR when it first came out. There was someone mining and dumping/distributing but by that time several had converted most of their BTC in XMR/had been proselytized and kept ragging against BBR that someone is dumping. It took dga to post how that whole thought point was just FUD and both XMR and BBR had gone through something similar in the beginning.

Well Dga talks about BCN, but Vitalik doesn´t seem to have read the article really well.

Hah yeah. From the article it also seems that that miner dumped all the XMR to BTC and then USD. This will have had the effect of ensuring an even fairer distribution amongst those who weren't mining, unless it was just one person buying the whole lot up (which I seriously doubt).

The main concern with pre/instamines is that someone could be sitting on a significant % (30%+) of all the coins in circulation, which could completely crash the market and make the coin worthless should they decide to cash out. Which isn't even remotely the situation here.

A clickable link (all it is is the David Andersen story regarding Bytecoin's handicapping of the mining code, nothing new):
http://da-data.blogspot.com/2014/08/minting-money-with-monero-and-cpu.html

If Vitalik isn't being sarcastic, then he definitely has bad reading comprehension skills.

Now, the history of "Bitmonero" (now called Monero) started to become relevant.  In Feb 2014, an anonymous group of developers released a coin called "Bytecoin" based on an entirely new implementation of a bitcoin-like cryptocurrency called Cryptonote, but with much stronger anonymity built in through the use of a clever Diffie-Hellman like mechanism for encrypting destination addresses and the use of Rivest's ring signatures to provide a transaction-level mixnet without the need for realtime mixing.  It's not perfect, but it's clever, and the most important thing is that it's new, and fundamentally different from Bitcoin.  That attracted a lot of attention.

But when Bytecoin was released, it was presented as though it emerged from two years on the "dark web" (Tor onion sites and the like), during which time, 80% of the possible coins that could ever be minted, had been minted.  The reception in the cryptocurrency community was heavily skeptical.

My strong belief is that the skepticism was warranted: Here's the original slow-hash from bytecoin as it was copied into Bitmonero.  It has some doozies.  For example, on line 100, you might note that for every iteration through an inner loop repeated tens of thousands of times, the AES key is re-imported into the library.  The later loop, starting on line 113, is repeated half a million times, and is so abstracted through lots of memcpys and pointer manipulation it's hard to tell that all it really does is one round of AES encryption, a pointer dereference into a random scratchpad, a 64 bit multiplication, and another pointer dereference.  Phew.  This original code was roughly 50x slower than my final optimized code, and could have easily been used to fake two years of blockchain data on a single computer or a small cluster.  I'm pretty sure that's what happened.

I wrote to a small exchange with /USD pairs based in Hong Kong. I'm not convinced with their security, but I've done some successful withdraws (EDIT: somewhat slow - 1-4 hours delays with manual confirmations from the admins). I wrote them mainly because of the XMR/USD pair they could add:

Dear Crypto-trade Team,
Last 3 months there is an unequal cryptocurrency on the market. It's called Monero (XMR) and it's different codebase and not a Bitcoin clone. It's using ring signatures and stealth addresses to achieve unlinkable and intractable transactions ant it's here to become the cryptocurrency of the future. If you research it you'll find that there is no other cryptocurrency to achieve even near to the privacy incorporated in the XMR protocol (excluding 80+% premine CryptoNight Bytecoin and also excluding other 6-7 proven scam projects of CryptoNight - see https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/blowing-the-lid-off-the-cryptonotebytecoin-scam-with-the-exception-of-monero-740112). There is no premine or ninjamine and it's the fairest launch possible. From it's start it's always in the first 4-10 on trading volume from all the coins (see coinmarketcap) and it's here to stay. It's not a pump and dump coin and it have a huge amount of Bitcoin early adopters in it's community! It's traded on 6-7 altcoin exchanges, but there is still no exchange with XMR/USD pair. My opinion is that if you add it on your exchange it'll be an opportunity for you to be the first and get some volume (possibly more then all the shitcoins you are adding lately). The XMR community is convinced that adding it to an exchange is an exchange decision, so don't expect voting - it's up to you to take the opportunity.

Name: Monero (XMR)
Bitcointalk: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/xmr-monero-a-secure-private-untraceable-cryptocurrency-583449
Source code: https://github.com/monero-project/bitmonero

Best Regards,
Z

Meh, so now Vitalik feels threatened by Monero? I think we're winning guys!